What Shall We Do? by Leo Tolstoy

Thought-provoking utopianism mixed with drunk-uncle curmudgeonliness

Leo Tolstoy is renowned as one of the world’s greatest novelists, but he also wrote short stories, plays, and nonfiction works. In the latter category, Tolstoy was quite prolific as an essayist and philosopher. His book What Shall We Do? was first published in 1886. In this nonfiction work, Tolstoy addresses the topic of poverty and the inequality of the class system. What Shall We Do? has also been published in English as What Must Be Done?, What Then Must We Do?, or What is to Be Done?

Tolstoy was born to a wealthy aristocratic family. He owned a few thousand acres of land worked by over 300 serfs. Around 1870, Tolstoy had a “born-again” experience. Although not a proponent of organized religion, he developed a philosophical conviction that one should live one’s life in accordance with the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus Christ. From What Shall We Do?, the specifics of Tolstoy’s theological beliefs are not entirely clear (I believe he covers that ground more thoroughly in his 1884 book What I Believe), but he definitely advocates the emulation of Christ’s life by giving up one’s riches for the benefit of others. His ethical views bring to mind those of the Christian socialists or Christian anarchists.

The first dozen chapters or so of What Shall We Do? feel like a waste of time, quite frankly. Tolstoy relates how he discovered poverty while residing in Moscow. He visits the housing projects of the poor and converses with beggars on the street. He tries to come up with charitable endeavors to alleviate the sufferings of the urban poor, but none of his attempts are satisfyingly successful. He asks his rich friends to donate money to the cause, and they all agree to do so, but then never deliver the funds they pledged. There is an annoying disingenuous to the way that Tolstoy discusses poverty in these chapters, acting as if he were a naive country boy who never realized that rich people or poor people existed before he hit the age of 50.

After this lackluster intro, however, Tolstoy starts to get into the nuts and bolts of his views on political economy. He discusses at great length the “division of labor,” which he sees as an excuse for the wealthy and privileged to avoid doing their share of the work in society. Whenever it is pointed out that some people labor like mules while others perform no labor at all, the reason given for this inequality is always “the division of labor.” Tolstoy sees no valid reason why the wealthy, the clergy, scientists and artists should be excused from manual labor, or why they are financially rewarded for doing so. In Tolstoy’s view, everyone should grow their own food, for starters, and contribute a fair share of manual labor required to legitimately justify their existence. Science and art are things should be done in one’s spare time and should not be funded by tax dollars. Tolstoy argues with an old-fashioned curmudgeonliness. In What Shall We Do?, he comes across as anti-government, anti-religion, anti-science, anti-art, and anti-birth control, among many other antis. He calls to mind American thinker Wendell Berry in that they both seem to think we would all be better off if we reverted to some quasi-Amish lifestyle. 

Nevertheless, Tolstoy has some very interesting things to say about money, the exploitation of labor, and income inequality. One of his more interesting ideas is that everyone should spend a few hours of each day performing manual labor, intellectual labor, and artisan handicraft labor. That may be an unrealistically utopian idea for today’s world, but it’s a utopia I might enjoy living in. Overall, I found What Shall We Do? to be a confusing mash-up of liberal and conservative ideas, but not without glimpses of enlightening wisdom. You’re bound to find something to agree with here, but it’s unlikely you’ll agree with all of it.
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A Confession by Leo Tolstoy

Straight talk from a seeker of meaning

Published in 1879, A Confession was Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s first work of philosophy. By this time he had already achieved fame through his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Around the age of 50, Tolstoy underwent an existential midlife crisis. After living a morally dissolute life, he began to question whether life has any meaning at all when all one’s accomplishments and experiences are wiped away by inevitable death. Is there a purpose to evolution, or is humanity merely random assortments of atoms, just animals struggling to feed themselves while living in fear of poverty, privation, illness, and death? Tolstoy contemplated suicide but didn’t have the courage to go through with it (his view, not mine). Instead, he began a deliberate quest for the meaning of life, seeking answers from scientists, sociologists, and philosophers and studying the religions of the world. A Confession is Tolstoy’s memoir of this personal quest for meaning.

In his rational examination of metaphysics, Tolstoy takes nothing for granted, and the book can get pretty dark when he contemplates the possible pointlessness of existence. This would not be a good read for someone with suicidal thoughts. Tolstoy is incredibly honest and forthright in his discussion of his moral failings, his loss of faith in God and life, and his attempts to find answers and become a better person. There isn’t a trace of egotism or intellectual arrogance in his narrative; he is merely a humble supplicant seeking knowledge, relating his findings, and admitting his ignorance when applicable in hopes of helping others with their spiritual quests. While some of the text can be philosophically dense, for the most part Tolstoy’s prose is very accessible to the general reader. When necessary, he constructs vivid metaphors and parallels that illustrate the ideas he’s trying to convey, thereby aiding the reader in understanding complex concepts.

The ending of A Confession is rather inconclusive, with Tolstoy still searching for answers. He mentions that he will continue the narrative of his quest in a later work. Tolstoy would follow A Confession with The Gospel in Brief (1881) and What I Believe (1884), in both of which he further elaborates on his religious and philosophical beliefs. The latter two books are mainly defenses of Christianity (or the aspects of Christianity that Tolstoy feels are worth defending) and therefore will appeal mostly to theists. A Confession, however, is an account of spiritual searching that can inspire both believers and heretical freethinkers alike. Tolstoy takes a critical view of organized religion, and when he does express a belief in God, it resembles a rational theism similar to Spinozan pantheism. As a freethinker and skeptic myself, I have never encountered a more reasoned and rational discussion of faith than that which Tolstoy presents here. Even so, from a nonbeliever’s perspective, his argument still seems to rest on faith as a last resort or faith by the process of elimination, rather than on a positive embracing of theism.

A Confession is a very candid and detailed account of Tolstoy’s thought process in searching for the meaning of life. While he talks about how he turned away from a parasitic life of wealth and status to admire the simpler life of the peasantry, I wish he had given more practical insight into the changes he made towards a life of asceticism—how did he go from Tolstoy the rich and famous author to Tolstoy the wise man who looks and lives like a monk? Perhaps he discusses that further in another essay, but he doesn’t delve too deeply into such matters in A Confession. Nevertheless, there is much food for thought and ethical lessons to be learned from this enlightening book. It may be one of the most depressing and one of the most inspiring books you’ll ever read.
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The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy

Love and war in the Caucasus

Leo Tolstoy’s novel The Cossacks was originally published in 1863 under the title of Young Manhood. That choice of title would lead one to believe that this book could perhaps be seen as a continuation of Tolstoy’s earlier trilogy of three novels entitled Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. Like those three previous novels, The Cossacks is a semi-autobiographical work based on Tolstoy’s real-life experiences. Since this novel is told in the third person with fictional characters, one would assume it is only loosely based on his own life. The love triangle around which the story revolves may be pure invention. Tolstoy did serve in the military during the Caucasian War, however, and his memories no doubt contributed to his vivid depictions of the sights and sounds of the Caucasus and the culture and lifestyle of its inhabitants.

Like Tolstoy, the novel’s protagonist, Dmitry Andreich Olenin, was a bit of a hellraiser in his youth. Olenin apparently made love to a woman he didn’t actually love, and his reputation has been tarnished by the scandalous affair. Fed up with the gossip and pettiness of Moscow society life, Olenin decides to retreat into the rural countryside. He enlists for military service in the Caucasus, where the Russians and Cossacks are fighting the Chechens. An independently wealthy gentleman jaded by big-city life, Olenin has all sorts of romantic notions about the Cossacks and their “simple” way of life. He boards with a Cossack family and to some extent “goes native,” befriending the Cossacks and embracing their lifestyle. His new friends can’t help but view him as an outsider, however, because of his wealth and upbringing. During the Caucasian War it was common for Russian officers to take up with Cossack girls. Burned by his past, Olenin resists this temptation for a more monastic lifestyle. Among the family he boards with, however, is the town’s loveliest maiden, Maryanka, and Olenin can’t help having his head turned by this enchanting young woman.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Russian authors were the most ardent proponents of realism and the foremost practitioners of the genre. Tolstoy expertly applies the realist lens to Cossack society and the Caucasus environment. This novel, however, still has a touch of Victorian romanticism about it. The rural setting is very idyllic, the love affairs somewhat idealized, and the depictions of the Cossacks come across as bucolic stereotypes. Maybe that’s because of the time period in which it was written, or perhaps because so much of the story is told through the eyes of Olenin. Though the story is related in the third person, Olenin’s perspective amounts to an unreliable narrator, his vision colored by his disappointment in Moscow society and his longing to find a place where he belongs. The reader never really feels like he fits in this environment, however, which was probably Tolstoy’s intention.

The Cossacks is a very good novel, perhaps one of Tolstoy’s best. I may have enjoyed it more had I not recently read Mikhail Sholokhov’s Cossack epic And Quiet Flows the Don and its sequel The Don Flows Home to the Sea. These twentieth-century novels by the Soviet Nobel laureate are masterpieces of realism that surpass Tolstoy’s Cossacks in just about every aspect. In the roughly 70 years between Tolstoy’s and Sholokhov’s books, realism became grittier and more brutally frank. As a result, Sholokhov’s Cossack novels approach the apex of the art form, achieving a literary artistry almost on a par with Tolstoy’s magnum opus War and Peace.
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Bondarchuk’s War and Peace: Literary Classic to Soviet Cinematic Epic by Denise J. Youngblood

The history behind the masterpiece

Though I am a lover of classic literature, I haven’t yet had the courage to tackle Leo Tolstoy’s mammoth novel War and Peace. Recently, however, I did see the Russian film adaptation directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, which was released in four parts from 1966 to 1967. This film is a true masterpiece of cinematic historical fiction that combines epic battles with intimate human drama. The artistic and technical aspects of the film are superb, and the grand scale of the production truly staggers the mind. The 2019 Criterion Collection DVD set includes a 45 minute interview with historian Denise J. Youngblood, an expert on Russian war films. I enjoyed her commentary so much that I decided to read her 2014 book Bondarchuk’s War and Peace: Literary Classic to Soviet Cinematic Epic. 

Youngblood’s Criterion Collection presentation focuses primarily on the making of Bondarchuk’s film, while her book expands the discussion to include literary and film criticism, adaptation theory, historiography, and the actual historical events upon which the novel and its films are based. The text is organized in a very logical manner. Chapter 1 covers most of the making-of material. If you’ve seen the Criterion Collection interview, then you’ve already heard about 80 percent of what’s here, but the book still contains plenty of new and interesting details. Chapter 2 discusses the definition of an epic, and whether Bondarchuk’s film qualifies as one. This hinges not only on the grand scale of the story and production but also on how well it embodies the culture and national spirit of Russia and the Soviet Union. Chapter 3 discusses Bondarchuk’s War and Peace as an adaptation, how it compares to Tolstoy’s novel, and the decisions Bondarchuk made in interpreting the source material. In Chapter 4, Youngblood examines how well the film reflects historical reality. Chapter 5 compares Bondarchuk’s film with director King Vidor’s 1956 adaptation of War and Peace, an American film that was very popular in Russia. Chapter 6 covers Bondarchuk’s follow-up film, Waterloo, another grand historical epic of the Napoleonic Era. Finally, a brief conclusion sums up, on a somewhat tragic note, the remainder of Bondarchuk’s career.

There is a lot of comparing and contrasting going on in this book: Bondarchuk vs. Tolstoy, Bondarchuk vs. Vidor, War and Peace vs. Waterloo, both films vs. history. The very nature of film studies requires that a large portion of the content be devoted to plot summaries (spoilers included, of course). Therefore, if you’ve read Tolstoy’s novel and have seen all these films, much of the text may be telling you things you already know. Such recapping is necessary, however, for Youngblood to illustrate the conclusions she draws, and her synopses are interspersed with enlightening observations on filmmaking technique. One also learns quite a bit about the history of Russia’s war against Napoleon’s France, as well as the cultural climate and cinematic history of the Soviet Union. Youngblood’s comprehensive knowledge in history, film, and Russian studies allows her to make revealing interdisciplinary connections between the three fields.

With about 130 pages of text and half that much in notes, bibliography, and index, Bondarchuk’s War and Peace is not a cumbersome read for the general reader. I am neither a historian nor film scholar, just a film and literature buff, yet I found Youngblood’s prose quite accessible and never boring. Anyone who appreciates Bondarchuk’s film will enjoy the fascinating behind-the-scenes and between-the-lines details that Youngblood delivers in this comprehensive study.
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

The final indignity
Originally published in 1886, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a novella by Leo Tolstoy. The story opens on a group of judges having a behind-the-scenes meeting in a court of law. The conversation is interrupted when one among them announces that Ivan Ilyich, one of their colleagues, has died. Though all the men in the room knew and worked with Ivan Ilyich, they respond not so much with grief but rather by considering what such a development might mean to their own career prospects. The setting then switches to Ivan Ilyich’s funeral, where the members of his family, with few exceptions, experience a similarly unsympathetic response to his demise.

Up to this point the deceased is still very much a mystery man to the reader. Tolstoy then proceeds to relate the life of Ivan Ilyich, or at least the end of that life—how he became ill and the events leading up to his death. After exhausting various possible remedies for his ailment, all unsuccessful, the problem is deemed incurable, and Ilyich is condemned to constant pain and permanent confinement in bed. Just as troubling as the physical pain, however, is the mental despair of impending death. Ivan Ilyich’s wife primarily views his illness as an inconvenience to herself and brands him a difficult patient, which only serves to upset and anger him all the more.

The plot can basically be divided into two unequal parts. The first is Tolstoy’s brutally frank and unglamorized portrait of terminal illness as an indiscriminately painful, shameful, and imprisoning experience. The second is the philosophical questioning of what it’s all worth. Is death just the cessation of life, or is there a point to it? Is there any meaning to life at all? Ivan Ilyich feels he has led a “proper” life in accordance with social norms. He has established himself as a prominent member of his community and built a small fortune for his family. Why is he being punished with such a gruesome death? Under closer scrutiny, however, his life has been primarily one of career-driven self-interest, and he has largely avoided his own family. In achieving “success,” he has led a hollow and purposeless life. By the time he finally comes to a deathbed examination of his own bourgeois morality, however, it is too little too late. Oddly enough, the same could be said of Tolstoy’s narrative. The bulk of the book is taken up by the blunt reality of dying, while the deeper philosophical inquiry feels a bit too little too late, rushed at the end and too vague to forcefully get across the moral message that Tolstoy is trying to convey.

In the 1870s, Tolstoy underwent a religious conversion. He began living a more back-to-basics lifestyle of austere self-denial and asceticism in order to achieve a more profound spiritual purity. The Death of Ivan Ilyich reflects this epiphany with its nondenominational philosophical advocacy for reassessing one’s values and establishing a more virtuous moral code. This is hardly a manifesto, however, as Ivan Ilyich teaches the reader more about how not to live one’s life rather than how one should live it. Though the imagery is forthright in its bleak harshness, the moral message could have benefited from more stridence and less subtlety. Personally, I feel a similar lesson was presented more movingly through the life of Levin in Anna Karenina. Nevertheless, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a beautiful work of realist writing, and one that feels surprisingly modern for the late 19th century. It is definitely worth a read for its artistry and insight, but many readers may find it more depressing than inspirational.
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Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian by Ivan Turgenev, et al.

Weak selections from superstar authors

Ivan Turgenev

This collection of Russian short fiction is part of a ten-volume series published in 1898 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, entitled Stories by Foreign Authors. Though the other books in the series offer a mix of famous and lesser-known writers, this volume features nothing but superstars. Despite the fame and glory achieved by these illustrious authors, the selections included here are not their best work, and the collection as a whole is a major disappointment.

Russian literature rose to prominence among world readers during the transition from romanticism to realism. Russian writers, along with those of France, led the vanguard in breaking away from the conventions of the past and defining the new realist style. In Ivan Turgenev’s “Mumu,” a wealthy old woman presides over a house full of servants in Moscow. Among them is a frighteningly gigantic laborer who is both deaf and dumb. After being spurned by a woman, this gentle giant develops a loving attachment to a puppy. In “The Shot,” by Alexander Pushkin, the narrator, an army officer, forms a friendship with a retired soldier. He later questions his judgment of character, however, when his new friend displays indications of cowardice. Both of these are adequately good stories, but they both give an inkling of what’s wrong with Russian realism. Turgenev and Pushkin seem to go out of their way to bore the reader, as if providing any degree of entertainment or satisfaction would be pandering to romantic conventions. Tugenev’s story is a little too cutesy at times, with characters that are often little more than cartoon caricatures. Pushkin’s narrative leads toward two possible outcomes, but in the end he opts for a third option that’s neither interesting nor gratifying but merely fizzles to a halt.

Nikolai Gogol’s story “St. John’s Eve” is a horse of a different color entirely. It’s yet another man-sells-his-soul-to-the-devil story, this time about a servant who wants to marry his rich master’s daughter. That’s my best guess anyway, because it’s really an unintelligible mess. It delivers loads of spooky Halloween imagery expressed in interminable run-on sentences. It opens with a bizarre and pointless intro that makes even the identity of the narrator unclear. It’s hard to say who’s to blame for this epic failure, the author or the translator, so I blame them both.

Not even the greatest Russian writer of all time, Leo Tolstoy, can save this collection. The book closes with a selection that poorly represents this great master, “An Old Acquaintance.” This story is set in an army camp in the Caucasus. What war they’re fighting isn’t important, since the narrative doesn’t concern itself with combat, but revolves around the relationships within the Russian ranks. A former gentleman of the higher class who has fallen on hard times volunteers for military service in hopes of improving his station in life. The officers don’t respect him because he’s poor, and he looks down on the common soldiers because they’re uncultured. 19th-century Russians may have found these class issues fascinating, but for everyone else the story is just a bore. None of the characters, of any rank or class, inspire any interest or sympathy.

Out of all ten volumes of the Stories by Foreign Authors series, this book is clearly the worst. Although intended to showcase the best that Russian literature had to offer in the late 19th century, it only showcases poor editorial choices and weak translations. If you’re looking for an introduction to classic Russian literature, you’d be better off searching elsewhere.

Stories in this collection

Mumu by Ivan Turgenev 

The Shot by Alexander Pushkin 

St. John’s Eve by Nikolai Gogol 

An Old Acquaintance by Leo Tolstoy 

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Youth by Leo Tolstoy

An inconclusive conclusion

Leo Tolstoy

Youth, originally published in 1856, is the final novel in Leo Tolstoy’s autobiographical trilogy of Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. It continues the life story of Nicolas Petrovitch Irtenieff, beginning about the age of 16 and covering roughly a year of his life. I was hoping that the finale of this trilogy would really bring the events of Nicolas’s life together into a cohesive narrative, but I found this volume to be, much like its predecessors, a series of observations that never really amounts to much of a story.

Youth shows some promise in the beginning, as Nicolas has reached an age where he begins to question the manner in which he will live his life as a man. He attempts to set down a code of ethics which will guide the future course of his behavior and his life. This leads the reader to believe that the novel will start to delve into the development of Tolstoy’s personal philosophy, which would make for a fascinating book, but unfortunately this thread is soon abandoned. The story then moves on to Nicolas’s college entrance exams, which is interesting for its historical insight into the Russian educational system, but not particularly moving. Next, the book moves to a series of social situations in which Nicolas interacts with various friends and family. These scenes are not really very engaging at all, and at times lapse into pointless description for description’s sake. Along the way, Nicolas starts to gain an awareness of class and to determine his position in the social hierarchy. He also begins to question that very hierarchy, but these inklings are merely faint stirrings that never add up to much. Tolstoy treats Nicolas’s social adventures with a fair degree of self-deprecating humor as he chronicles his surrogate’s foolish notions, shallow vanities, and awkward faux pas. Unfortunately, the book never reaches the point where Nicolas learns the errors of his youthful foibles and moves beyond them. The book doesn’t have so much an ending as it does a truncation. The entire trilogy feels like an introduction to some as yet unwritten work. It’s all a bit of tease, a promise of things to come.

The value of Tolstoy’s autobiographical trilogy lies mostly in its importance as an autobiographical document, not in its literary merits. The more you know about Tolstoy and the more you love his work, the more you will enjoy the trilogy for what it tells you about Tolstoy. In and of itself, however, it’s not a great work of literature and is in fact even a little frustrating for the reader. The most moving episode in the overall story is the death of Nicolas’s mother, which occurs back in the first book. Nothing in the two subsequent volumes even approaches the emotional power of that event. The rest of the trilogy reads like a series of skillfully told yet only mildly amusing anecdotes which would have faded into obscurity had their author not gone on to become one of the greatest writers of all time. Lucky for us he moved on to bigger and better things.
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Boyhood by Leo Tolstoy

A boy’s life, continued

Leo Tolstoy

Boyhood, originally published in 1854, is the second novel by Leo Tolstoy and also the second book in his autobiographical trilogy, which begins with Childhood and ends with Youth. Largely based on Tolstoy’s own early years, the trilogy is the first-person account of a boy’s transition into manhood. This second installment covers the life of Nicolas, the narrator, roughly from the ages of 14 to 18.

Like Childhood, this book reads less like a novel than a memoir. It consists of a series of recollections of life events on the part of the narrator. These isolated scenes aren’t really interconnected enough to comprise a satisfying plot; the book succeeds more as a psychological study than as a novel. Any forward movement in the narrative is derived from the growing awareness of the boy as his thought processes mature. Through Nicolas we experience the universal daily dramas so important to a child, such as the development of an attraction towards the opposite sex, the making of a new friend, the growing apart of brothers, and the struggle to be taken seriously and earn the respect of one’s elders. These events are covered with great insight and sensitivity by Tostoy, but en masse they feel like a collection of observations in a notebook and never really coalesce into a novel.

That said, Boyhood is slightly better than its predecessor. What really sets this book above the mediocre is the account of the life story of Karl Ivanitch, the narrator’s boyhood tutor. This side story, which takes up chapters 8 through 10, is a very moving tale of the hardships of working class life during the time of the Russian war against Napoleon. These three chapters succeed as a short story in and of themselves and are clearly the best part of the book. Since Nicolas, like Tolstoy, grew up in a relatively wealthy family, much of the book revolves around master/servant relations. The tale of Karl Ivanitch is only one example of how the servants’ lives, in this book, are often more interesting than those of the master himself.

Though Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth were published as separate novels, they are intended to be read as one body of work. Boyhood ends rather arbitrarily, and really makes little sense without the books that come before and after it. Fans of Tolstoy will no doubt find Boyhood a promising and necessary step in the development of his great masterpieces, but it can’t be counted among them. When judged solely on the basis of its own literary merits, it’s clearly good writing, but nothing exceptional.
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Childhood by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s semi-autobiographical debut

Leo Tolstoy

Childhood is the first novel by Russian author Leo Tolstoy. It was originally published in 1852, and is the first in a trilogy of three short novels, of which the second and third volumes are entitled Boyhood and Youth. Childhood relates events in the life of a ten-year-old boy, Nicolas Petrovitch. Although the narration is in the first-person, the story is not told from a child’s point of view, but rather in the voice of a grown man looking back on his youth. Thus there is often a dual perspective between the observations and emotions of the young boy and the intelligent reflections of the adult.

Nicolas is the child of an aristocratic family with an estate in Petrovskoe. Under the feudalistic system that existed in Russia at the time, his father governs over a large retinue of servants and serfs. The book begins by depicting the boy’s idyllic life on this country estate. It is hinted, however, that the family’s financial situation is not entirely secure, and soon it is revealed that Nicolas and his brother Woloda are to be sent to live in Moscow with their grandmother. From that point the book switches focus to more urban matters, such as the social scene among the nobility. In keeping with the time, place, and aristocratic milieu in which the story takes place, the book depicts a hunting party, a society ball, and meetings with princes and princesses. The novel’s real strength, however, lies in its depiction of universal childhood experiences like the comfort and security of home life, the rise and fall of friendships, a first taste of love, or the death of a family member.

Although this is a work of fiction, Tolstoy obviously based some of it on his own experiences. The book does not read like a debut novel at all, but rather like the memoirs of an aged, successful writer who feels sure that his every anecdote will fascinate the reader. Unfortunately that’s not necessarily true for today’s audience. Though Tolstoy’s debut caused a sensation when it was published, and reputedly revolutionized Russian literature, to the 21st-century reader it does not stand out as a remarkable work. Tolstoy does a fine job of depicting the experience and psychology of a child, but for much of the book the plot is not particularly compelling. It’s simply a series of recollections and character sketches that bear little relation to each other, until far into the book’s latter half when events finally start to coalesce into a satisfying narrative. To its credit, Childhood ends on a high note. The final three or four chapters are very powerful. If only the first half of the book were as effective.

Tolstoy’s debut definitely shows the promise of great things to come, but this book is not in the same literary league with later masterworks like Anna Karenina. It’s quite possible that the rather clunky translation by C.J. Hogarth, which is far from a poetic read, may not be doing Tolstoy’s prose any favors either. All the same, Childhood’s strong finish definitely makes me want to move on to Boyhood and see how the trilogy develops. Perhaps after reading Nicolas’s life in its entirety I will gain a new appreciation for this first installment. As it stands, however, Childhood’s primary value lies not so much in its literary merits as in the autobiographical insights it offers on its illustrious author.
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